Fiscal sanity is dead because most people are irrational hypocrites

By David McElroy · August 13, 2011

When I attended a meeting earlier this week about a new sales tax for my suburb, there was a continuing theme that was disturbing. What I heard from supporters of the tax was bad, but what I heard from opponents was just as bad, because many of them were hypocrites.

In order to sell the tax, politicians are throwing out bait in the form of various projects that they promise to do with the money. The disturbing thing I heard from many tax opponents is that they’re adamantly against the tax, but they want the projects done anyway.

We’re a nation of people who have had costs disconnected from benefits — to the point that most people don’t seem to make the connection anymore. People want good things to just magically happen. It doesn’t occur to them that it’s their responsibility to find a way to provide what they want. They’ve been trained to believe that The Government will take care of everything.

You can see how out of touch people have become by looking at things said during the health care debate last year. Many of those who opposed the Democrats’ efforts to take over even more huge chunks of the medical system didn’t seem to understand that much of what they have now is already “socialized medicine” — and nobody better threaten to take it away from them.

The classic example is represented by the sign above. Ignoring the other issues with the sign, it’s hard to take someone seriously as an opponent of big government when she’s opposing one form of state-run health care because she’s afraid it will hurt a different form of state-run health care that she does like.

There are two possibilities. One is that people are too stupid (or too unaware, to put it more politely) to notice the contradiction. Maybe some of them truly just haven’t made the connection. Maybe they believe The Government has vast store houses of wealth just waiting to serve us. Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to them that the state has nothing that it doesn’t first steal from us.

The other possibility is the scarier one. They might see the connection, but they just don’t care as long as they get what they want.

A politician trying to force people to pay for things — or make it clear that people can’t have the things they want from government — is going to lose his election. So winning politicians are going to promise whatever people want. It’s insane, but that’s the way the incentives work.

I’m honestly not sure whether people are stupid (or “unaware”) or if they just don’t care. It’s probably some combination. But no matter how you slice it, people want things and they want someone else to pay for them. Is it any wonder that we’re heading for economic and social collapse?

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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